The Charlotte News
Wednesday, January 12, 1949
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett told the press that the U.S. had expressed concern to the British Government regarding British troop movements in the area of Palestine in advance of the peace conference about to start on the Island of Rhodes. The British action was in response to the downing of five RAF planes the previous Friday by the Israelis, who claimed that they were over Israeli territory. The British, who claimed the planes were over Egyptian territory near the border, had sent troops to the Trans-Jordan port of Aquaba on the Red Sea at about the same time, claiming that it was to prevent any deepening of British involvement in the Middle East conflict.
The National Council on Civil Rights asked the President to establish a permanent Federal commission on civil rights to hear complaints of violations, and sought also additional proposed laws in the areas of education, voting, protection of life and property against mob violence, and employment.
A group of about twenty Southern Senators, led by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, met in the office of Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia to discuss strategy on defeating the President's civil rights program, presumably utilizing the filibuster. Democrats were proposing to limit the ability to filibuster by a Senate rules change to allow cloture by a two-thirds vote of the membership at any time, regardless of whether a given Senator still held the floor. Another proposal would allow cloture by a simple majority vote. Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana said that he would start a filibuster when any of the civil rights measures came to the floor for debate.
North Carolina lawmakers continued to protest the cancellation of two veterans' hospitals, one in Charlotte and one in Salisbury, by the Veterans Administration.
In Raleigh, a bill to increase minimum teacher pay to $2,400 per year for teachers holding a Class A certificate, urged by Governor Scott, was introduced to the State Senate. Maximum pay under the bill would be $3,900 per year for teachers with graduate degrees and several years of experience.
In Chateau D'oex, Switzerland, twelve Swiss children died in a fire, along with two nurses, at a children's camp where they had been spending a holiday.
In Oklahoma City, a postal inspector was shot to death in the lobby of the main post office, allegedly by a disgruntled 65-year old man, arrested for murder. The man claimed that the postal inspector had committed slander against him and that therefore he had to take the law into his own hands, shot the man in the head with a pistol. He told police that he had brought a knife along also in case the gun did not work properly.
In another incident in Oklahoma City two days earlier, an attorney who was a former U.S. Attorney was slain by two bullet shots to his back. Witnesses described the assailant as an elderly man between 55 and 60, with gray hair and a stoop, wearing a hearing aid, steel-rimmed glasses, a dark overcoat and a light gray hat.
He may have been a little older, judging by the overall description.
In Greensboro, N.C., an advertising executive of the city and a woman were found dead in a bedroom of the man's home, having succumbed to smoke inhalation from a fire in the living room sofa which burned through the floor.
In Charlotte, Parks & Recreation Commission superintendent Arthur Jones resigned to take a post with the American Trust Co. R. Foster Blaisdell, 42, of Tyler, Texas, with fifteen years experience as parks superintendent in two Texas cities, was named as his replacement. Mr. Blaisdell was the Southern regional representative for the National Recreation Association, succeeding Mr. Jones in that position.
Emery Wister of The News tells of Mary Sue arriving from New York in a crate aboard Eastern Air Lines the previous night. The owner let out the two-year old to play with his tools utilized in making bank fixtures. Mary Sue, twenty inches tall, however, dropped the hammer and retreated to a corner. She was content to eat roast beef and potatoes, had not yet learned to smoke cigars. She took a look at herself in the mirror and did not like what she saw, backed away. He had received Mary Sue from Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus after he did some favors for the show when they were in Charlotte in November. Mary Sue, if you haven't figured it out already, was a midget.
Parenthetically, as Jeep Hunter of the Tom Franklin Studio provides a photograph of Mary Sue examining herself in the mirror, we have to wonder of the symbolic significance or not intended by juxtaposition the day before of a photograph, by the same photographer, of former Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall looking at himself in the mirror while tying his cravat. Too bad it wasn't Strom Thurmond, and the reflection through the aperture would be well taken.
Snow
See there, we told you it was them Martians what landed in Roswell back 'ere in July, '47.
On the editorial page, "A Matter of Principle" discusses the city's disappointment in having a planned seven-million dollar, 500-bed veterans' hospital canceled by the V.A. As the V.A. was planning a new 20-million dollar, 1,000-bed neuropsychiatric hospital for North Carolina, the logical site, it offers, would be Charlotte.
The newspaper, which had regularly counseled paring Government waste and overlap, finds that the cancellation of the hospital, according to the V.A., fell into this category and so remains consistent in supporting the decision.
It quotes Thomas Hardy from The
Hand of Ethelberta in urging
that of Charlotte it should not be said that "like the British
Constitution, she owes her success in practice
"Stretching the Parole System" finds the North Carolina parole system, premised on giving a convicted individual an opportunity to re-integrate to society after serving reasonable punishment for the crime of which he or she was convicted, to be a sound system for the most part. But, as with any such system, it was subject to abuse and evidence existed that the North Carolina system was being abused.
Superior Court Judge Frank Armstrong had demanded an investigation of the system, as he had observed that hardened criminals were being paroled after serving only a fraction of their sentences. Judges frequently had to give longer sentences than a defendant ordinarily deserved to assure that he would serve a reasonable sentence in the first instance, prior to parole.
The piece cites several cases which supported Judge Armstrong's view. One man, for instance, convicted of second degree murder out of Robeson County, had served only seven and a half years of his 30-year sentence before being paroled. Another man from Wayne County, convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life, had served only eleven and a half years.
The piece suggests that if Superior Court judges were disturbed over the system, then the Legislature ought look into the matter.
"From Defense to Offense" applauds the stance of The American Milk Review in urging the
dairy industry to stop fighting against repeal of the discriminatory
tax on margarine
Drew Pearson tells of Senator Robert Taft and Senator Allen Ellender, for years linked together as co-sponsors of the Taft-Ellender-Wagner housing bill, having parted ways when Senator Taft became concerned that a new bill being proposed, endorsed by Senator Ellender, would only provide for a million housing units over a period of seven years rather than five years as the previous bill. Thus, Senator Taft wanted to read the bill first before signing on, but Senator Ellender refused to wait and so introduced his own bill.
At the State of the Union, Arkansas Representative E. C. Gathings had his eight-year old daughter present on his lap. She clapped heartily for the President when the Democrats applauded. She continued to clap with the other members, however, when the President began to speak of his civil rights proposals. Southern members, however, remained stoically silent, and Mr. Gathings therefore grabbed his daughter's hands and restrained her until the subject changed.
Senator Owen Brewster of Maine was trying to take credit for getting Senator Margaret Chase Smith, also of Maine, appointed to the Republican policy committee. But in fact, the decision had been made before he had expressed support of the appointment, and it was done to appease the liberal wing of the party.
Colorado Representative John Carroll and newly elected Ohio Congressman Stephen Young met at the swearing-in ceremony for Congressmen, for the first time since they had served together on Anzio beachhead in Italy during the war.
Representative Harry Davenport of Pennsylvania, who had defeated Representative John McDowell of HUAC, wore a yellow tie, symbolic of his opposition to Taft-Hartley. He promised to wear the tie until the law was repealed.
Edith Ridgely, hostess of the House restaurant, had studied pictures of the new Congressmen and knew most of them by heart the first day, was able to call them by name.
India Edwards of the women's division of the DNC had submitted to the President a list of fifteen women whom she wanted appointed to high-level positions in the Administration.
Marquis Childs tells of the appointment of Dean Acheson as Secretary of State and James Webb as Undersecretary being indicative of a move by the Administration to make the State Department the instrument of foreign policy, reducing or eliminating military direction. Particularly Mr. Webb entered the post without past baggage from the State Department which could cause conflicts. That was important as Mr. Acheson, formerly Assistant Secretary and Undersecretary of State, had opposition, such as Senator Kenneth Wherry, who had frequently in the past made him a whipping boy for foreign policy decisions.
The White House carefully weighed the fact that Donald Hiss, brother of Alger, was a member of Mr. Acheson's law firm, but found that none of the evidence before HUAC had implicated Donald, and that the effort to smear Alger Hiss had stretched to include his brother. HUAC had tried to suggest that Alger Hiss had been instrumental at the Yalta Conference in advising FDR to make compromises with Stalin. Mr. Childs regards this effort as the product of "malicious fantasy". He had spoken with a person without an axe to grind who had been present at Yalta in February, 1945, who told him that Alger Hiss conferred with the President no more than once or twice and then only with several others present in a general conference of the U.S. delegation.
Mr. Acheson had worked with Alger Hiss in the State Department only as he had worked with other technical assistants and had admired his intelligence and efficiency.
The White House had been pleased that there were no advance leaks of the appointment, as speculation had continued to center on Chief Justice Fred Vinson as the probable appointee.
From the Republican perspective, the appointment was controversial, only less so than if Justice William O. Douglas had been appointed. But now that the President had a majority in the Senate, he did not need to appoint a non-controversial Secretary of State, and the President owed no duty to the Republicans to appoint a bipartisan Secretary to his Cabinet.
James Marlow discusses the President's proposal to raise taxes on corporations and middle and high income taxpayers by four billion dollars, as well as raising the Social Security tax by two billion dollars to pay for expanded coverage to embrace 25 million more beneficiaries.
One of the reasons for the income tax hike was to avoid deficit spending; another was to permit payment against the 252 billion dollars of debt run up by the country during the war. The Social Security tax would be raised from one percent to one and a half percent of payroll for both employers and employees. That would provide 1.7 billion dollars in new revenue. In addition, another 300 million would be added by a health insurance tax.
A letter writer finds the letter of A. W. Black appearing on January 7 to have libeled Dr. Hamilton Holt for his piece of January 3 urging world government. Mr. Black had said the United World Federalists, of which Dr. Holt was a board member, had been infiltrated by Communists. The writer finds the attack unjustified.
A letter writer recommends a world government to remedy the inability of the U.N. to agree on positive action. She cites the vote of December 27 on Indonesia when, because of abstentions, the requisite majority of seven of eleven members of the Security Council could not agree on either of two proposals condemning the Dutch in its attack on Indonesia, even though combined, the two proposals had enough votes.
The writer appears to have misread the report, as the Security Council did vote affirmatively to order the Dutch to release the Indonesian prisoners and to halt hostilities immediately. The lack of a majority had occurred on a resolution to have the Dutch retreat to their original lines prior to initiation of the action.
Furthermore, just how a world government organization would obviate the conflict encountered at the U.N. between the West and Russia, or between any two states or groups of states historically beset by mutual suspicion bred of disparate political and ideological systems or past aggressions, neither she nor any of the world-government advocates bother to explain with any precision. They appear to assume that some, suddenly introduced omnipotent hand, the proverbial deus ex machina, could first bring about agreement between the nations to submit to such an authority, free of nationalist, sovereign self-interest, and that, once done, that same authority could compel obedience by whole nations, themselves comprised of differing internal interests, to its unbiased decisions. Such was the very aim of the U.N., but one which was only capable of realization by a slow evolutionary process.
The concept of world government in the era immediately following two world wars and all of the suspicions and mutual fears which led to them and remained in their aftermath, while understandable in its premises, was, in its attempt to substitute theoretical perfection for something flawed but at least capable of evolution, idealistic poppycock lacking all pragmatism. It was tantamount to throwing out the U.S. Constitution and starting over with what amounts to a police state, a dictatorship rather than a representative democracy, the latter inevitably ugly and full of discord but less likely to erupt in internecine conflicts than with the alternative, an enforced agreement which brings only a temporary Pax Romana
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.